The Bahamas are a chain of islands running from Florida to the southeast for more than 1,400 km. The are part of the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Caribbean. Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the New World in 1492. The Bahamas were inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno people, for many centuries. In 1513 the Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to slavery on Hispaniola, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted. In 1648 English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera. The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718.
After the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to The Bahamas. They took their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. African slaves and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this time on.